In the mid-1920s, a series of pamphlets appeared on the streets of Melbourne published underthe name of one William Rodier. The pamphlets鈥� lurid cartoons raged against complacent landowners for not having employed his technique to control the rabbits that had ravaged the Australian countryside. Theyalso predicted dire consequencesforthe future of Australia if the rabbit plague was not beaten back. The 鈥淩odier method鈥� couldn鈥檛 be simpler, the pamphlets claimed: trap and kill only female rabbits, and the excess of virile males would then 鈥渨orry鈥� the remaining does to death and kill any young unfortunate enough to be born. Afterthree decades of pleading with the governmentand landowners to use his method to tackle the rabbit problem, Rodier, it seemed, had finally lost all patience.
TO SOME, William Rodier was a fanatic. Others called him a fool, his obsession 鈥渟ickening鈥�. He may have been both, but he was also arguably one of the first environmental activists, and one with a fervent respect for the power of experimental science.
It hadn鈥檛 started that way. The 1880s were a boom time for people settling the western parts of the British colony of New South Wales. Several years of unusually wet weather had turned the countryside almost as green as the mother country. With wool prices and optimism high, Rodier, then in his thirties, had bought Tambua, a 128,000-hectare sheep station 100 kilometres west of the outback mining town of Cobar. He may have expected an easy life, raking in the money as his sheep ate their way through the virgin pasture. What he hadn鈥檛 banked on was the onset of an 11-year drought, burgeoning numbers of livestock, ever more kangaroos sustained by the station鈥檚 water holes 鈥� and rabbits. Both grass and Rodier鈥檚 optimism vanished.
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Although the first European settlers took rabbits to Australia, the colonies always fizzled out 鈥� until, in 1859, a new, hardier batch was shipped in for hunting. Loosed into the wild, they bred exponentially. 鈥淭here was unlimited food. As they filled up one niche, they鈥檇 move on, rolling across the landscape. It must have been an awe-inspiring spectacle, a phenomenon that we are unlikely to witness again,鈥� says James Noble, a historian and ecologist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Canberra, who has studied Rodier鈥檚 life.
Faced with what seemed an insurmountable problem, the New South Wales government and most landowners soon threw in the towel. The intention had been to 鈥渕ine鈥� a prosperous countryside, make a quick killing. With that option no longer on the cards, British investors began to pull out. The big agricultural companies were forced to run smaller numbers of sheep on far larger tracts of land. The smaller landholders tightened their belts or left altogether. Rodier was one of very few who showed concern about the destruction he was witnessing: the rabbits stripped the land, leaving ruined pastures, dead and dying trees, and desert where there had been bush. Spurred on by the destruction, the threat to his livelihood and a sense of patriotic duty to queen and country, Rodier set about solving the rabbit problem.
With what he gleaned from Darwin鈥檚 On the Origin of Species and other scientific literature, Rodier came up with a novel way of exterminating the rabbit: kill only the does. Then the bucks, with their legendary virility, would what he euphemistically called 鈥渨orry鈥� the remaining females to death. He called it the Rodier method.
Rodier pushed his method tirelessly. He employed it on Tambua and claimed great success, with higher stocking rates for his sheep and far more grass than his neighbour, whose property he described as 鈥渁 howling wilderness of desolation and despair鈥�. He testified on the rabbit problem before a Royal Commission on pastoralism in 1900, harassed his neighbours to tackle it using his technique and harried the government, demanding that it at least run experiments to test his theory. He offered 拢500 to anyone who could prove his method would not work. He published letters in the Pastoral Review, the Stock and Station Journal, and corresponded with the editor of Nature.
Much to his disgust, landowners treated the whole thing as a joke, referring to Tambua as 鈥渢he buck farm鈥�, while the government did its best to ignore him. Surprisingly, some scientists were more easily won over. 鈥淩odier was very widely read for a landowner stuck in the middle of nowhere,鈥� says Noble. He could quote Darwin and other prominent naturalists, and that gave him an air of scientific respectability. 鈥淎nd he had a clear theoretical basis for his method.鈥�
Philip Sclater of the Royal Zoological Society in London was positively enthusiastic about the Rodier method, perhaps in part because the technique was 鈥済reener鈥� than other means of exterminating rabbits. Most landowners put down poison, which killed not just rabbits but anything else that consumed it.
In 1889, Sclater wrote of the Rodier method in Nature: 鈥淣o disease that might otherwise cause injury is introduced, no other noxious animal is proposed to be imported, but advantage is taken of the well-known natural laws which regulate the increase of life to effect in this instance a salutary decrease.鈥� In 1902, Nature published another article stating that 鈥淢r Rodier鈥檚 plan鈥hich is certainly theoretically correct, ought to be tried by the authorities on a large scale.鈥�
But is it still considered theoretically correct a century later? 鈥淚n retrospect, it would never have worked,鈥� says population ecologist Charles Krebs of CSIRO. 鈥淢ale rabbits are highly territorial, so rather than the male rabbits worrying the females to death, you would have ended up with lots of territories with no females in them.鈥� But, he adds, 鈥渢here was zero knowledge of animal behaviour even 50 years ago. It was a good idea for its time, and good ideas should be scientifically tested.鈥�
And that, according to Noble, was Rodier鈥檚 real achievement. His ceaseless agitating did eventually lead to the first publicly funded experiment in Australia. From 7 May 1905 to 11 April 1906, the government veterinary surgeon, James D. Stewart, oversaw an experiment in which different ratios of bucks to does were housed in six pens, and the number of offspring monitored. The experimental design was poor by today鈥檚 standards, and the results were ambiguous. Certainly Rodier was justified when he complained that the experiment did not constitute an adequate test of his method. All the same, the experiment marked the beginnings of the now multimillion-dollar research programmes into the control of exotic pests in Australia.
鈥淩odier鈥檚 role was to be an irritant, to agitate, to get up people鈥檚 noses. He got the government to do something,鈥� says Noble. Since then, Australian government scientists have fought long and hard against the rabbit. Initial attempts with poison, warren ripping and rabbit-proof fences failed to halt their spread. Since the 1950s, two biocontrol agents, myxoma virus and calicivirus, have reduced the rabbit population to a fraction of its size during the plague years. But although some people saw these diseases as a godsend and many more as a necessary evil, their use triggered public outcry about animal welfare and the risk to other species. What鈥檚 more, rabbits are becoming resistant to both agents. Australian scientists have now turned again to sex, working on a genetically modified contraceptive virus designed to spread through the population.
In the end, Rodier was driven off the land, defeated by drought, overgrazing 鈥� and rabbits. He sold Tambua in 1907 and went to live in Melbourne. But if the landowners who had ignored Rodier鈥檚 exhortations thought they had heard the last of him, they were wrong. Rodier took his campaign onto the streets of Melbourne, where for the next 20 years he distributed lurid pamphlets attacking landowners for their apathy. It was the landowner, he proclaimed, and not the rabbit that was Australia鈥檚 greatest pest.